Set Your Teams up for Success with Hiver’s Team Inbox

Even with the growing popularity of social media platforms and messaging apps, emails continue to be the primary channel of communication for businesses across the world. 

77% of customers use email to get support, as noted in our exclusive “The State of Customer Support” report. 

However, email was designed for one-to-one communication and not for collaboration. We are talking about personal accounts that cannot be shared with people unless you hand out the login credentials to them. The only other way to share emails or add people to a conversation is to use forwards, CCs, and BCCs.

This is where a shared inbox solution comes into play.

Now more than ever, there is a pressing need for teams to work together seamlessly to manage business activities. One effective way to enhance the efficiency of different teams in your organization is by using a shared team inbox. 

Understanding a Shared Inbox Management Solution

Also referred to as a team inbox, a shared inbox is an email account that allows teams to track, analyze, and respond to queries more efficiently. A shared inbox lets you create team-specific email addresses and add relevant team members. For example, [email protected] for your support team, jobs@ for your HR team, billing@ for the finance team, and so on.

Shared team inboxes foster team collaboration, streamline workflows, and enhance communication, offering a more robust alternative to Google Groups for business needs. They enable everyone on the team to keep track of each other’s tasks and thereby handle incoming messages seamlessly.

If your team is working out of a shared email account in Gmail, then you’re surely aware of what a nightmare it can be for collaboration. This is the exact reason we built Hiver — to help teams collaborate using Gmail without any friction.

4 Key Advantages of Using Hiver’s Shared Inbox for Gmail

A team inbox has a huge impact on your team’s efficiency. Hiver’s shared inbox is built on top of Gmail. Its user-friendly collaboration capabilities and automation power up productivity.

Here are some of the biggest benefits of using Hiver’s shared inbox solution, which is also trusted by 8000+ global teams today: 

1. Easy Email Tracking, Assignment, and Prioritization

Hiver’s streamlined and transparent processes empower teams never to miss an email and easily assign tasks to team members, right from the comfort of Gmail. 

The ‘Round-Robin Assignment’ feature lets you automate the process of assigning emails to their rightful owners, promptly and easily. Extremely useful for teams that find it challenging to manually assign emails to teams – especially when the ticket volume is high and frequent. 

Besides efficient email assignments, Hiver’s G Suite shared mailbox also lets you track the progress made on every task or email. You can track your team’s emails and keep a tab on their status – open, pending or closed.

Also, Hiver’s tags feature helps you organize your team inbox. Use tags like ‘Leads’, ‘High-priority’, or ‘Payments’ to label or categorize and prioritize group emails. Improve your team’s ability to spot significant customer interactions and respond to them with a complete resolution. 

2. Real-time Collaboration and Communication

An email provider will only let you manage individual tasks and interact with team members or customers one-on-one. There’s a huge restriction on team collaboration over emails.  

You require a solution to help your teams accomplish more together and collaborate easily for faster response times.  

With a team inbox like Hiver, team members can have contextual and private discussions about incoming emails, without needing to switch to external collaboration tools like Slack. You can use Hiver’s Email Notes to have one-to-one conversations with your teammates, right alongside a respective email thread. Notes are just like chat messages, except they stay next to the email thread forever. 

Moreover, you can even invite your managers or other team members to help you draft real-time responses with our Shared Drafts feature. This makes email and team collaboration seamless like never before! 

3. Visibility and Transparency in Team Performance

When your team members are working out of their individual inboxes, it’s tough to gauge what tasks they are working on at any given time of the day. But with a team inbox, you can monitor and review both your team’s tasks as well as performance.

Karl Pearson once said, “That which is measured improves”.

And that’s exactly what a shared inbox software like Hiver does – it lets you track, measure, and elevate team performance to achieve desired results, and ultimately delight customers. 

Hiver’s advanced analytics and reporting capabilities help you: 

• Monitor the performance of your team members based on response and resolution times.
• Measure how satisfied your customers are with each interaction; through customer satisfaction surveys.
• Identify spiking trends in your team’s email conversations so you can avoid roadblocks in the resolution process. 
• Analyze gaps in your team’s workflow and processes so you can make necessary improvements.

4. Personalized Templates and Reduced Response Times

Every 3 out of 4 customers want their queries to be resolved within 24 hours. This means that your agents have to answer all the questions that a customer may have, within a day, amid all the other requests that they are already attending to. 

Email overload and agent burnout are real problems. Close to 90% of employees are burdened with recurring tasks. 

Hiver’s team inbox helps you better handle this situation. It lets you automate mundane and repetitive tasks, thereby ridding your team of grunt work and allowing them to focus their attention on complex issues.   

Additionally, Hiver also allows you to save frequently-used emails as templates. Respond to customers quickly by creating and saving customizable email templates on your dashboard. Also, easily organize these email templates into folders and share them with your team for better turnaround times. 

Hiver’s Shared Inbox Solution for Multiple Teams

Supporting and delighting customers is the responsibility of every team, even if these departments don’t face the customers directly. Rightly so, Nate Brown, Chief Experience Officer at Officium Labs, suggests that customer experiece is an organization- wide mission.

To make that happen for your organization, your teams must collaborate for success. The best way to avoid internal miscommunication is by maintaining transparency through a shared inbox solution. Hiver helps teams achieve that and more. 

Manage your team inboxes such as support@ or sales@ right from your Gmail inbox using Hiver. 

Here’s how Hiver helps power up teams:

1. Streamlining Workflows for Customer Service Teams

A customer support team is meant to provide timely and empathetic responses to all customers. Consistently meeting customer needs and expectations is their biggest goal. With Hiver, your customer-facing teams can: 

• Streamline workflows by assigning customer emails and chats to suitable agents. 
• Prevent two or more agents from sending conflicting or duplicate responses with collision detection.
• Manage customer expectations and service quality with SLA monitoring.
• Offer real-time support using live chat.
• Use email notes to share important information about customer communication within the team. 
• Label and organize emails based on priority or type using Tags.
• Monitor key performance metrics to improve efficiency and support quality.
• Gather customer feedback with the help of CSAT surveys.
• Use email templates to send out quick responses to customers.

Learn how itGenius provides outstanding customer experiences with Hiver.

2. Making Finance Teams More Efficient

Enhancing operational efficiency and streamlining financial processes are vital to every finance team. You must ensure all the information is organized and your team is on top of their tasks – preparing invoices, reports, or managing vendor emails. Using Hiver, your finance team can: 

• Simplify and speed up financial processes by ensuring everyone on the team is on the same page.
• Evenly distribute tasks among team members to ensure that all incoming emails are attended to on time.
• Automate workflows and approval processes for faster resolutions.
• Monitor the progress of tasks such as billing and vendor management. 
• Create and monitor customized reports for financial operations like reimbursements.

Learn how DecksDirect handles finance emails 60% faster with Hiver.

3. Helping Sales Teams Convert Leads into Customers

Sales teams are under constant pressure to meet their sales targets. They need a system that allows them to work quickly and efficiently. Responding to customers on time can even help teams grab a new deal over a competitor. With Hiver’s team inbox, your sales team can:

• Streamline sales workflows to close current deals quickly and work on winning new deals. 
• Use automation to respond to sales inquiries remarkably faster.
• Assign critical leads to the most experienced sales agents.
• Create email templates to answer customer FAQs.
• Collaborate with teammates more efficiently with the help of private notes and shared drafts.
• Know customer needs and preferences by tracking customer conversations and feedback.

Learn how New York Custome labels use Hiver to convert leads into customers.

4. Making HR Teams More Organized

For an HR team, a team inbox can get flooded with requests concerning leave applications, job applications, payroll, benefits, and much more. Managing such emails can take up much of your team’s time daily.  

Without an email management system, information is likely to slip through the cracks. Here’s how Hiver can help:

• It centralizes information in a single place and helps the team complete its tasks faster — keeping them focused, happy and productive.
• It allows you to manage HR emails a lot more efficiently. Every email has a dedicated owner, and tasks can be easily tracked, managed, and resolved.
• It lets you organize emails with the help of labels or tags. You can create labels like Payroll, Reimbursements, Benefits, Insurance, Interview, Reviews, etc.
• Automations, shared drafts, and email templates help you quickly resolve HR queries.

Learn how the people team at Clutter improved their effiency by 25% with Hiver.

Manage Teams Better with Hiver

Shared inboxes can do wonders for your teams. Do you think your team needs a performance and productivity boost? Give Hiver a try!

Hiver, the world’s first customer service software for Google Workspace, turns your Gmail into a collaborative workspace. Teams can now work efficiently and collaboratively right from a place they love – Gmail. 

• Request a demo
• Sign up for a 7-day free trial